By the standards and practices of the Vegas Golden Knights, John Tortorella had it coming. His first three-game losing streak as the team's head coach was enough for Knights general manager Kelly McCrimmon to decide he'd seen enough, and the fact that the three losses in question came in the Stanley Cup Final mattered not. Team policy is team policy.
Gerard Gallant, the team's first coach, got it after a four-game losing streak in 2020. Peter DeBoer, who replaced him, got it after a win that came after a three-game losing streak, but it still counts because the win came in the team's final game that season. Bruce Cassidy got canned with eight games left after a three-game losing streak. And now Torts. No wonder the Knights have the reputation they have.
In fairness, this might have been predetermined, that Tortorella, who lives in Florida, was called out of three years' quasi-retirement to replace Cassidy and didn't want to relocate to Nevada. Maybe McCrimmon told him ahead of time that this would be a temporary assignment, and sent him home with a lot of hoodies and tees and maybe even a souvenir skate sharpener for the grandkids. But Torts did say during the Finals run that he would like to coach in the NHL again, and the only open jobs are in noted hockey lunatic asylums in Edmonton and Toronto, and Tortorella would barely reach Christmas before pulling off his own head in a post-practice scrum and coating the gathered reporters in plasma. That's no way to go out, even for someone as polarizing as him.
But here's the beauty of it all. Torts leaving Vegas with a record of 21-8-1, which would be the sixth-highest percentage in league history, is still not the weirdest coaching saga in a league that considers coaches with the same level of human dignity as a heap of oily rags. Including the odd interim coach who gets two games before being re-demoted, the league has made 78 coaching changes since COVID, which makes coaching an NHL team the equivalent of day labor.
No, the weirdest situation remains in Edmonton, where the Oilers are now awaiting the results of a league investigation into the suitability of hiring the repeatedly defrocked Mike Babcock. The investigation was supposed to have taken place while he was coaching in Columbus, but he quit that job before training camp after accusations that he looked at players' phones. Add to that the matter of Cassidy, who has not been given permission to talk to other teams about jobs because he is still under contract to Vegas. And then there's the Leafs vacancy, which is just a matter of organizational dithering at this point given that it's been five weeks since they fired Craig Berube and nine weeks since their last game.
Maybe we should have expected the Knights to move on past Tortorella all along, given that they are allegedly warm for their AHL coach Ryan Craig. For one, he would be cheaper. For two, his coaching gig is in Henderson, so there would be no moving expenses. And for three, he knows the protocol—lose three in a row and out you go.
Given what we know about the sanctity of NHL jobs, Torts could become the new Rick Bowness, Interim Replacement To The Stars, maybe even before Christmas. There are only three jobs that he can't realistically have next year—Carolina, Colorado and Tampa Bay haven't changed a coach in eight years—and five more that probably won't have him because he's already worn out his welcome there—the New York Rangers, Vancouver, Columbus, Philly and Vegas, although if Craig hits the three-loss jackpot early, never say never to a second marriage.
Anyway, Tortorella can tell his pals at the golf course he is the first coach to get to the Stanley Cup Final and then lose his job since Terry Murray managed it in 1997. Then again, Murray had pissed off almost the entire Philadelphia roster by then, and probably got the hook so that he wouldn't be strangled at the team's end-of-year potluck. Torts can keep his bags packed and by the front door, because if the Babcock thing goes the way it probably should, well, 1-800-TORTS-OK is a 24-hour hotline for just such occasions.
